UW-Madison culling tweets about bullying
Posts from the social media service Twitter are providing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a new way to study bullying among kids.
UW-Madison researchers Amy Bellmore and Jerry Zhu, along with graduate students Junming Sui and Kwang-Sung Jun, have been able to teach a computer to identify tweets about bullying among Twitter’s 250 million daily posts.
The researchers said the computer was able to quickly learn to identify more than 15,000 bullying-related tweets per day.
One goal of the researchers’ work is to assist traditional bullying research. Typically, this research relies on surveys in which victims and bullies report their experiences. This means researchers get a one-time glance at what is happening within a small population.
photo via flickr:CC | Western MAJ
